Five days before Christmas last year Toby Spence had one of the best days of his life, followed by the worst. Spence is an operatic tenor, one of Britain’s finest. At 42 he was at the height of his powers, and on December 19 at Covent Garden he gave arguably the most impressive performance of his career in Wagner’s epic Die Meistersinger. “Charismatic and brilliantly sung,” I wrote in The Times, while TheDaily Telegraph declared that “his breezily confident charm almost stole the show”.